This blog is a safe space – so let’s just say it. DevOps is hard work and boring. There. We said it. To most people in tech and software, DevOps is tedium and busywork that gets in the way of the “real” work – making software. This is why it’s often left by the wayside, or done improperly. So, what if we told you that if you got it right, your job would be better, more fun, your business more profitable – all that kind of pie in the sky fantasy stuff?

GitLab is a DevOps platform that helps developers manage the software development process, from the planning stage straight through to the release. The GitLab app also offers a time tracking feature that allows you to track estimates and time spent on epics and merge requests within the app itself. But is GitLab time tracking the answer to all your time management needs? In this article, we will explain how to use the time tracking feature in GitLab and discuss its limitations.

When you’re working towards SMART goals, you’ve got to be able to measure the impact your efforts are having. In fact, that’s what the M in SMART goals stands for. In Agile teams and DevOps, measuring performance is critical to quantifying the impact of your team’s work. And, without measuring how things are today, it will be impossible to know whether all our hard work will actually make any difference in the future.

We are excited to announce the launch of the Bitbucket Cloud Migration Assistant, an Atlassian-supported app built to help Bitbucket Server customers automate the migration process from Bitbucket Server to Bitbucket Cloud. If you are considering a move to Bitbucket Cloud, this is the easiest way to get started. Download the app from the Atlassian marketplace.

In the daily life of a Site Reliability Engineer, the main goal is to reduce all the work we call toil. But what is toil? Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and scales linearly as a service grows. This blog post describes our journey to automate our nodes rotation process when we have a new AMI release and the open source tools we built on this.